What the Fires Left Standing

A hermit’s notes on rebuilding a life from the inside out

Mar 12, 2026

I’m Hamish. I’m 44, I live in rural north Norfolk, UK and a year ago my life fell apart in ways it had been waiting to do for decades.

My fledgling marriage imploded just three weeks after the wedding, kicking off what I have dubbed my Season of Shit. Seven months of blame, aggressive projection, and the slow suffocation of becoming someone’s emotional landfill. In the end, I walked out to save my own sanity and left a version of myself behind that had been running on fumes for four decades.

My marriage was the catalyst, but my old life’s demolition had been set and scheduled by something much older than that.

I’d been living someone else’s life, though it took me forty years and a disastrous marriage to finally open my eyes and see it all clearly.

I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. My mother screamed at me often and hit me with wet tea towels and hairbrushes. At 12, I was packed off to boarding school where I had to learn to be invisible. The message was clear before I could articulate it: your voice is dangerous. It’s safer to stay quiet.

So I stayed quiet. For more than forty years.

I built a career as a chartered building surveyor, diagnosing how structures fail, writing reports on cracks in walls and the causes of penetrating damp. Decent money, interesting, steady work. I had a life that looked perfectly adequate from the outside but felt like a slow drowning from within.

Then the drowning stopped, because the rug got pulled out from underfoot.

In that wreckage, I found things I didn’t even know were buried.

I’m neurodivergent, with ADHD and a splash of autism on my palette, doing their contradictory dance together. One side wants order and silence, the other novelty and fire. Together they create a mind that sees patterns everywhere, connects things that don’t appear to be linked, and crashes hard when the sensory load gets too heavy.

For most of my life, I’ve been framed as a problem. Too intense. Too sensitive. Too much. I was medicated for the wrong things and masked through the rest.

What I’ve learned since the floor gave way: these traits aren’t defects. Hyper-vigilance is a radar. Enhanced pattern recognition is how I see connections others miss. The sensitivity is a high-gain antenna for the truth. It just needs better calibration rather than a mute button.

The energetic cost is real, though. Shutdowns can wipe out a whole day. Executive function can vanish mid-sentence. I have a body that stores every sensory insult until the accounts become overdue.

Re-framing these traits doesn’t erase the tax they carry.

I’ve been doing the heavy work. Therapy. Sobriety. Shadow work with inner parts I’d spent decades ignoring. I have a fierce warrior inside me, a trickster goblin, a wise woman of the woods, a shadow vizier who breathes my rage, and more. Buried under all of them, a wizard-child who sees in symbols and was told his whole life that he was the problem. These all got split off from my awareness by trauma, though they all carry energies I can harness.

I’ve read the books, and more than that, I lived the books. The deep ones with far more substance than your average tome of self-help on display at your local Waterstones.

I took every framework that resonated with me: somatic intelligence, nervous system regulation, the Enneagram, archetypes, consciousness medicine, Human Design, and more. I tested them against the reality of my own broken life - the ones that held up against the actual pain I experienced, I kept. The rest got composted.

Somewhere in the middle of that work, the old world caught fire. A job that frustrated me and crushed my soul: redundant. The last ties with a mother who never wanted me: severed. A lifetime of masking, of trying to be the person I was expected to be in any given situation: abandoned.

The anxiety-driven engine that powered my old life sputtered out.

I had to learn how to “be” again from scratch.

What I discovered in the rubble: I’m a surveyor of my own consciousness.

The same disciplines that taught me to read a cracked lintel, to look at a wall and see the load paths, the weak points, the areas that are going to fail, even if they haven’t yet, that discipline also applies to the psyche.

I can diagnose structural failures. I make records before I demolish. I don’t patch plaster over subsidence, I go down to the root, to the foundations.

I’m also a builder. I’ve spent the last year constructing what I call the Tesseract, a system for self-integration, built with the help of AI and the kind of obsessive attention to detail only a hyper-focused surveyor could sustain. It’s the tool I use to hold all of this together.

And I’m a storyteller. I sat down to write for myself about what had happened to me, just to make sense of it all, and I didn’t want to stop. That surprised me most of all. It turns out that the voice that was silenced from birth has things to say. The man who spent twenty years writing building condition reports can also write about the human condition. The precision is the same, the honesty and the clarity is the same. It’s only the subject that changed.

This is 🕯️ Cinderlight’s Rest, the name I give to the quiet space where this work happens.

Think of it as an hermitage with stools by a slow fire, where the door is left left ajar. I’m no guru; the word puts my hackles up. I’m just a traveller who walked a particularly difficult stretch of terrain and is writing notes about what he found there. These notes are for anyone walking a similar path. If they’re useful, take them, and if they’re not, walk on. The door will still be open if you decide to come back.

If you’re rebuilding a life from the inside out too, or if you’re wondering whether the floor is about to give way beneath you feet, perhaps these notes will help you find your bearings again.

What you’ll find here to start with:

📜 Letters from an Hermitage — personal dispatches from an active transformation. Neither theory nor advice. Just honest accounts of what it’s like to rebuild a life from within, written by someone in the middle of doing just that.

🏮 Lights Along the Way — practical tools and small, tested practices for grounding, orientation, and staying sane when everything around you has rapidly gone awry. The kind of thing I wish someone had handed me when I was face-down in the rubble.

⚙️ Tinkering in the Tesseract — the tools behind this work, shown honestly. AI, Obsidian, and the particular obsessions of a neurodivergent builder trying to make a mind he can actually live in.

Some things I’ve planned for later down the road:

Gatherings ‘round the Hearth — invitations to sit by the fire and share. Questions posed to the community. A space where the hermit shuts up and listens.

Voice of the Gleeman — stories from the road. Fiction, myth, and dark imaginings from the troubadours who travel with the hermit. Not everything true can be easily said plainly; some truths only arrive through story.

Running through all of this:

The work of shadow integration: shaking hands with the parts of me that hold my rage, those who push me to please those around me, or who tell me it’s safer to keep schtum.

The peculiar texture of a neurodivergent life, receiving fourteen conflicting signals at once in a body that has to carry them all.

The seasons as a language for inner weather; the self moves in cycles, not straight lines.

And the long, strange project of building something of your own, from scratch, at 44, from the remains of a burned career.

I’ve mentioned it above, but I want to be clear and honest about this. The project is built assisted by AI, though not in the way you might find distasteful.

I use AI the way a land surveyor uses a theodolite: as a precision instrument that extends what I can see and measure. These words are mine. This voice is mine. The pain and the joy and the hard-won clarity: all mine, too.

But the structure that holds it all? That’s a collaboration between a human mind and several digital ones, and I think that collaboration is worth documenting openly rather than hiding it behind a hoarding.

This is also a part of the story I’m telling. How a 44-year-old neurodivergent surveyor-turned-hermit uses emerging technology to reclaim his humanity.

I haven’t arrived yet, so I’m writing from a road less-travelled.

My divorce isn’t finished. My career transition is still in progress. My body still carries decades of stored tension, and my voice is still finding its full volume after a lifetime of enforced quiet.

I’ve found my direction now. My nature is my north and my body knows the way. My wounds - the ones I spent forty years trying to plaster over and the ones I picked up along the way - these turned out to be the gateway.

I say this looking back, not from up on high. The wound is only a gateway if you can survive long enough to turn around and see it. For some of us, it’s still just a wound, and that’s real too.

Three truths hold steady under everything I write here.

🌟 Sovereign Essence — your nature is your direction.
🌊 Somatic Intelligence — your body knows which way to go.
🌀 Spiral Passage — the wound can be the gateway.

If any of that pulls at a truth inside you, know that you’re not alone and you’re welcome at this fire.

Where does it sit in the body, the weight of a life you didn’t choose?
What rules were written for you before you had the words to question them?
If the floor gave way underfoot tomorrow, what would you find in the rubble?

Hamish

This letter has passed through landscapes of: